Oops: Government kids portal shares name with gay porn site

Directgov, the website for UK public sector information has found itself in a spot of bother after it emerged that one of their initiatives to explain the basics of how Britain’s government operated to small children happened to go under the same name as a gay porn fetish website.

Buster’s World, a “virtual environment that offers loads of fun games, exciting videos and cartoons”, pictured a friendly dog with a Sheriff’s badge, helping to articulate different government policies and services as well as serving content for parents and teachers.

What wasn’t apparent at the time of launch on the DirectgovKids site was that if you were to execute a search query for the term “Busters World”, the top search result would be that of a gay porn balloon fetish website which, quite obviously, would not be what your dear little Johnny was attempting to access.

The naming faux pas emerged after a Falkirk based Twitter user More4Mums was drawn to the X-Rated website when her 6 year old son highlighted the website after visiting the Directgov portal at school earlier in the day. It was then picked up by Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp blogger for The Drum, who contacted Directgov to clarify the naming policy and whether they actually knew of it’s explicit namesake.

To their credit, the Department of Children Schools and Families issued an immediate response with the following statement:

Dear Gordon,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention; we have acted urgently to sort this out. Here is our statement:

“The naming of this webpage was clearly a mistake and we regret that the supplier’s usual thorough checking procedures when creating web content seem to have failed. When this was brought to our attention we urgently took the site down, pending a rename, to avoid any further issues.

“The name concerned was new and had not yet been promoted widely to young people.

“The safety of children on the internet is of paramount importance and we will be looking at the procedures of our suppliers to ensure this does not happen again.”

The Buster’s World content has since been removed from the DirectgovKids website and according to The Drum, will be back pending a name change. It’s not clear on how long the content had been published but for a website using UK celebrities to promote it’s services, it’s not the greatest bit of publicity.